RFF and RFF Experts in the News

"While Dudley sees flaws with the Obama administration's social cost of carbon, she urged the Trump administration to consider reconvening the working group it had just eliminated rather than leaving the task of coming up with the next value to outside groups. Such groups already have stepped up since Trump's announcement, including the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future, which launched an initiative in June to update the social cost of carbon in line with new research."

"Power plant emissions of nitrogen oxides, a lung irritant that is a key ingredient in ozone, fell by about two-thirds during that time. In an interview, Joshua Linn, one of the paper's authors and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, attributed the bulk of the emissions drop to EPA caps put in place under the Clean Air Interstate Rule and its successor, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, and the fact that coal-fired plants were running less."

Quoted People:

A prominent member of the president’s own administration, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, is on the public record as recognizing that a warming trend is already underway and has noted — some would say prophetically — that “this warming is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events that will be distributed unequally in time and geography.”

Quoted People:

"TAKE A GLANCE! HOW TO DISMANTLE AN OLD PLANT: Resources for the Future released a report Wednesday on key considerations when decommissioning coal, gas, oil, wind, and solar assets. It’s especially timely given a recent wave of plant retirements with more expected to follow in the near future."

Quoted People:

"Why the difference? The answer is complicated. But as Richard Newell, President of Resources for the Future, has noted, two changes in assumptions generally drive much of the difference in the results. First, the Obama Administration had included global benefits from curbing climate change in its calculation, whereas the Trump Administration counted only benefits directly linked to the United States. Second, the Trump Administration included a 7 percent discount rate for future benefits, a rate higher than any rate used by the Obama Administration. Using this assumption has the effect of reducing the monetary estimate of benefits that occur in the future, benefits that are discounted to compare them with costs that occur in the present."

"Under Obama, the agency tallied the global climate benefits of the CPP. Under Pruitt, it is only counting the US portion of those climate benefits. The administration pitches this as part of its 'America First' policy.

There is no way to exaggerate what a bad idea it is.

Casey Wichman of Resources For the Future has a great (if rather too charitable) consideration of the details, but at least four problems are obvious."

Referenced Publication:

"Over at Resources For the Future, senior fellow Timothy Brennan says there are ways to try and ensure reliability without funneling more ratepayer cash to financially struggling coal and nuclear plants.

Instead, he writes in a new post, regulators could 'treat offers of energy or capacity as binding, subject to meaningful penalties for nonperformance.'"

Referenced Blog Post:

"Karen Palmer, an economist with Resources for the Future in Washington, DC, warns that these steps to repeal the CPP create ‘a lot of regulatory uncertainty’ in the industry. ‘The expectation is that there are ultimately going to need to be regulations of these emissions, since the EPA is required to do so by law, and so this introduces uncertainty about what that is going to look like,’ she says, noting that the supreme court has ruled that the EPA is obliged to regulate carbon emissions. ‘Power plants are long-lived assets, so this sector would like to have some sense of future regulatory requirements,’ Palmer asserts.

Further, she suggests that the White House used fuzzy math to arrive at a positive net benefit from repealing the existing CPP. Specifically, the Trump administration estimates that the rule’s reversal could help avoid up to $33 billion (£25 billion) in compliance costs in 2030. She says the EPA appears to have discounted the air pollution benefits associated with the CPP. ‘The benefits of reduced sulfur dioxide and NOX emissions are calculated in a way that is counter to the literature – it is not a full accounting of the benefits,’ Palmer tells Chemistry World. ‘It implies that their reduction to below certain thresholds of concentrations of fine particulates don’t provide any health benefits, and that assumption is counter to the public health literature.’"

Quoted People:

"The EPA also appears to have changed how it is thinking about a key factor called the 'discount rate,' which is central in calculating the social cost of carbon. The discount rate is 'meant to represent the opportunity cost' of spending society’s dollars on fighting climate change, 'rather than what those resources would have otherwise been invested in,' said economist Richard Newell, who co-chaired the National Academy’s report and is president of Resources for the Future."

"The 7 percent rate yields a considerably lower social cost of carbon. But 'there’s good reasons to think that such a high discount rate is inappropriate for use in estimating the social cost of carbon,' Newell said. He explained that when it comes to the impacts of climate change, those generally affect individual consumers where a rate of 3 percent is more appropriate.

'This is a case where we have specific information which points to the use of a consumption rate of interest, and in that case, the use of the 7 percent rate is simply conceptually inappropriate,' Newell said."